![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3d3176cf99cae23d0ac119d1ea6c4d11.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Jaakko Luttinen <jaakko.luttinen@aalto.fi>wrote:
Hi!
I have two comments about scipy.spatial distance functions.
First, scipy/spatial/src/distance.c contains several interesting distance measures. However, the vector versions are not visible outside the file because they are not declared in distance.h (for instance, euclidean_distance). Only the pdist_* and cdist_* versions are made visible. I would like to use the "raw" distance measures directly for some other functions, so would it be ok to introduce those in distance.h?
I don't see a problem with that.
Second, squared Euclidean distance is computed by taking the square of the Euclidean distance. I think it would make more sense to do it the other way around: the Euclidean distance is computed by taking the square root of the squared Euclidean distance.
Makes sense, should be a little faster.
If these suggestions are ok, I can try to implement them or how should I proceed? Or any other comments?
Implementing them and sending a pull request would be good. If you're familiar with these metrics, perhaps you also have an opinion on these two tickets: http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/1484 http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/1486 It seems that the definition of a couple of the metrics is incorrect. Ralf